The Mitt Romney Who Might Have Been

It was almost exactly four years ago that Mitt Romney watched up close as John McCain agonized over how he should respond to America’s spiraling financial crisis. What McCain ultimately chose to do, six weeks before the election, was to suspend his campaign and return to Washington to meet with President Bush and Congressional leaders. But that strategic gamble — which now takes its place in the annals of political misfires — came as a result of a somber meeting earlier that day with his economic team at a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The attendees included several of the candidate’s big donors in the finance industry, a few political advisers and Romney.

“It was an unrelentingly bleak discussion, with the financial guys talking about the world as we know it ending,” recalls Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was McCain’s senior economic adviser at the time. Another McCain senior staff member, who, like many people I spoke with, would speak only under the condition of anonymity, told me: “At the time, there wasn’t a person on the political team who understood what a credit-default swap was or toxic mortgages or subprime bundling. At one point I asked, ‘What do you mean by economic collapse?’ And one of them answered, ‘It means you won’t be able to get a 20-dollar bill out of an A.T.M.’ Right after the meeting I called my wife and said, ‘Get $30,000 in cash out of the bank today.’ It was terrifying and surreal.”

Romney had been an informal adviser, fund-raiser and campaign surrogate for McCain since dropping out of the G.O.P. race seven months earlier. Well before the meltdown of the markets that summer, the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital C.E.O. had emphasized his vast experience in the private sector. As he told one campaign audience in Sarasota, Fla., in January 2008: “I will not need briefings on how the economy works. I know how it works. I’ve been there.”

That day in the Hilton conference room, however, Romney did not distinguish himself as McCain struggled to decide what course he should recommend in Washington. Holtz-Eakin recalls “nothing specifically” that Romney had to offer. The other McCain senior staff member is more emphatic: “The reality is he didn’t take command. He wasn’t a Marshall-type figure who conveyed an understanding of both business and politics. But the truth is, no one else had any clue what to do, either.” Then he added, “There wasn’t a single person in the room, including Romney, who had any specific policy recommendation.”

Four years later, Mitt Romney’s unsteady campaign performance has yet to convince voters that he is a “Marshall-type figure” who can, in his own distinct way, fill the office of the presidency. Only recently has Romney begun to detail the policies he would pursue if elected, as if they were hatched from a few late-night strategy sessions after a string of bad news days rather than from the candidate’s core philosophy. The fact that Romney is in charge of his own widely criticized campaign doesn’t appear to be especially reassuring to the electorate — and even so, his campaign tactics reveal only what he would do in order to win, not what he’ll do once he has won.

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Gov. Mitt Romney in 2003, about to give a speech about bringing business to Worcester, Mass.Credit
Winslow Townson/Associated Press

Romney faces an incumbent with his own leadership issues, though Obama has the benefit of surrogates who are deft at ascribing fittingly presidential characteristics to him. One morning in June, I sat in the Chicago mayor’s office of Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff, watching as he emptied a grab bag of leadership adjectives: “competitive,” “disciplined,” “resolute.” Emanuel then bolted out of his chair, saying, “This’ll give you a sense of his mind.” He led me into a hallway where the walls were festooned with images from the Oval Office. Pointing, the mayor said: “This is literally his first day as president, 9:30 in the morning. There’s nothing on his desk, obviously — first day. This,” he then gestured to another framed photograph, “is me coming back after I’m mayor-elect, sometime in early 2011. You see anything on that desk?”

I didn’t. Obama’s desk still looked nearly vacant. Emanuel whirled to the other wall and directed my attention to a much earlier photo, featuring himself and another familiar face, seated behind the same desk, which in this shot was ornamented by a riot of Victorian clutter. “Clinton,” he grinned. “Look at the desk. Now mind you, he’s got everything arranged. Books are stacked, folders are over here, the coins soldiers gave him here, the pens — he loved pens — here. Incredibly creative mind.” And then pointing back to Obama’s spartan desk: “Incredibly disciplined mind. Both incredible presidents. But their desks, in my view, say something.”

What Mitt Romney’s old desks tell us about his ineffable powers of leadership is hard to divine, but through private conversations with Romney’s senior strategists over the years, it’s clear that they are as genuinely admiring of their candidate’s biography as they are inept at selling it to the outside world. Bob White, who worked with Romney at Bain Capital, led his 1994 Senate campaign and later assisted him at the Winter Olympics and in every campaign since, said to me: “The totality of Mitt’s experiences — starting up a business, taking all that he learned from Bain and applying it to the Olympics where the situation was dire and then moving on to another broken situation in Massachusetts and fixing that as well — uniquely qualifies him for the challenges of the presidency. Time and time again, Mitt has stepped forward.”

You almost never hear Romney staff members cast their candidate in such a manner. Maybe it’s because White’s distillation calls to mind a lifelong technocrat who does whatever works rather than a conservative leader who sticks to “what’s right.” But it’s especially rare to hear the candidate or his operation refer to the period of his life when he actually did wrestle daily with both what works and what’s right on behalf of his constituents — the four years by which we can best judge what kind of president Mitt Romney might be. Drawing conclusions from his single term as Massachusetts’s chief executive is, obviously, a feat of extrapolation, because the issues that he faced as well as the powers that he wielded hardly measure up to those of the Oval Office. Still, those four years are telling, even more than the campaign’s decision not to talk about them.

To the newly elected governor of Massachusetts in January 2003, the commonwealth was a deeply flawed business model requiring sweeping remedies. He went about enacting them in the dispassionate manner of a C.E.O. Romney coaxed three non-Republicans out of the private sector and into cabinet-level positions. In addressing the state’s $3 billion deficit, “Mitt was opposed to an across-the-board cut, so we had to go through the state budget line by line, and that took an incredible amount of time and focus,” recalls his senior adviser and former chief of staff, Beth Myers. Another former Romney administration official told me that the governor’s methodology for analyzing the budget — “What’s your product line, what are you trying to achieve, whether you’re cost-effective in certain areas and whether you’re setting your prices right”— was deliberately Bain-like. Having informed Grover Norquist that he would not be signing a no-taxes pledge, the governor made creative use of various revenue streams — including raising registry deed fees that had stayed the same for decades and closing corporate tax loopholes that existed only to benefit a handful of firms.

Romney’s budget was clever but uncontroversial; the need to address the deficit was universally acknowledged, and Democrats had no appetite for increasing income taxes after having already done so the previous year. As the Massachusetts House minority leader Brad Jones told me, “The Democratic Legislature quite frankly didn’t have to do anything he wanted and could have done whatever it wanted and overridden his vetoes with ease and impunity.” Closing the deficit, in any event, was the easy part. In Romney’s appraisal of the state’s financial paradigm, much bolder moves than simple short-term reductions and increases were required. The C.E.O. relished such scenarios: his writings, his marathon policy meetings and his heritage as the son of George Romney, the American Motors Corporation chairman, revealed a fondness for unorthodox ideas.

And so the chief executive sought a complete reorganization of the state’s executive branch. He commissioned Bain to map out a dramatic restructuring of the 29 state-university campuses. He proposed a major reduction in the number of lawyer and press-secretary positions in state government, closing or merging several courts and doing away with the state’s Turnpike Authority. In a move that would be reprised years later in Wisconsin and Ohio, his administration took dead aim at public-employee pensions. “First thing we did,” a senior official recalls, “was sit down with all the unions, including the state police, and say: ‘We have new rules: you guys aren’t getting any more money than the revenue growth we’re achieving at the state level. Now go home and think about that.’ Next thing we said was, ‘All these chummy negotiations are over — here’s a list of what we want.’ And they looked at the list like we were from Mars.”

But for the most part, the only unconventional ideas that Romney managed to enact were those that he could ratify unilaterally. “He made significant consolidations in those agencies he directly oversaw, like housing, environment and transportation,” says Kerry Healey, his former lieutenant governor. “But higher education is buffeted with various boards and commissions, so we were reduced to working around the edges to achieve our goals. And something like making changes in the pension system, there would have needed to have been a lot of consensus built around it.” Romney’s failure to muster such a consensus had little to do with his party affiliation: other Republican governors in Massachusetts, like Frank Sargent and William Weld, long profited from excellent relations with their Democratic counterparts in the State Legislature. But what Sargent and Weld had that the Bain C.E.O. lacked was experience in forming political alliances and reaching compromises. “For better or for worse, he hadn’t been a creature of the Legislature, and neither was his lieutenant governor,” says Brad Jones, the minority leader. “Maybe that’s a good thing on the campaign trail, but it makes governing a challenge when you don’t have the relationships.”

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Melanie’s Law, which toughened sentencing for repeat drunken drivers, was one of Romney’s early successes as governor in 2005. To his right is Nancy Powell, the mother of Melanie.Credit
Bill Greene/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Several of Romney’s initiatives, like higher-education reform — which would have entailed tuition hikes and severe budget cuts for some schools — were deeply unpopular. Building grass-roots support was not part of Romney’s world experience, and he made almost no effort to enlist the public in his crusade. “Obviously change is difficult, and for a governor or president, bringing about change is a very different art form from the private sector,” Michael Widmer, president of the conservative-leaning watchdog group Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, told me. “Romney put forward some very positive reforms. But as it turned out, he never really followed up on them in any meaningful way.” Instead of working with the Democrats on Beacon Hill, Romney decided to recruit a host of Republican challengers to unseat them in 2004. The tactic backfired. “He ended up losing three seats and a lot of good will in the bargain,” Widmer said.

Later in his term, the governor would show more adroitness at rallying the public to pressure lawmakers. In 2005 Romney introduced a bill that would become known as Melanie’s Law — named for Melanie Powell, a 13-year-old girl who was killed by a repeat-offense drunken driver — that imposed strict sentences on those who were convicted of drunken driving multiple times. When a few state representatives who were trial lawyers tried to dilute the bill, he responded with a barnstorming tour that shamed Democrats into restoring nearly all the original language, which Romney then signed into law in October. The next month, Romney successfully fought back against legislators seeking to pass a retroactive capital-gains tax, by inviting about a dozen nonwealthy citizens to a news conference to describe how the new tax bill would upend their lives. “Melanie’s Law and the capital-gains tax are perfect examples of how a governor can succeed,” the former Democratic House speaker Tom Finneran says. “I’ll give the governor credit for growth. I think he learned as he went along that being governor wasn’t like a Bain takeover of a troubled company.”

In a sense, however, that’s exactly what being governor was like for Romney. He came in, reimagined the business model, improved the numbers, profited handsomely from the experience and subsequently moved on.

In 2007, I asked Romney when he began to think about running for president. “It was probably, oh, back when I was with Senator [Bob] Bennett of Utah after the Olympics, when I was governor a couple of years, sometime in 2004,” he replied. “He just said to me: ‘You know, you don’t have to decide if you want to be president. But you do have to decide if you want the option to become president.’ ” (Bennett confirmed that he conveyed this in a memo just after George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004.)

And so during the final two years of his term, Governor Romney’s balance sheet included a new and weighty set of considerations. When the needs of his state coincided with the needs of his national political profile, Romney showed a willingness to accommodate his political adversaries that had not been apparent during the first two years of his governorship. This was particularly evident during the effort to pass a universal health care initiative in Massachusetts in 2005-6. “It’s largely true that in his last two years he focused on two things: the beginning of his run for the presidency and health reform, which was to be his signature achievement and one for which he deserves a significant amount of the credit,” Widmer told me. With noticeable amusement, David Bowen, a senior staff member for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who played a key role in the effort, added, “Everyone thought at the time that Romney’s success in forging a bipartisan compromise on health care was actually a thing that he would ultimately run on, not run away from.”

To get the legislation passed, Romney partnered with Kennedy, his former political opponent in the 1994 Senate race. Together they met with Bush’s Health and Human Services secretary, Tommy Thompson, during his last day in office in January 2005 and persuaded him to renew a $385 million Medicaid-funding waiver that was crucial to financing the legislation — and then accompanied Thompson to a going-away party in the building, where Romney and Kennedy performed an “Odd Couple” skit that brought down the house. “I must say, I was favorably impressed with Romney in the meeting,” another Kennedy staff member recalls. “I’d seen him in the [1994] Senate debates, and he seemed plastic and about an inch deep — where in this small meeting he was witty and engaging and working to make it happen.”

Romney became the most vocal proponent of the so-called individual mandate (requiring nearly all residents to purchase insurance on a sliding scale of affordability), which Kennedy and progressive groups initially resisted but later warmed to, without heavy-handed pressure on the governor’s part. When a legislative deadlock between the state’s two top Democrats, Senate President Robert Travaglini and House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, in February and March of 2006 threatened to sunder progress, Romney staged unannounced (yet well-publicized) visits to their homes but otherwise left it to Kennedy’s more experienced hands to produce a détente between the two leaders.

Once a deal was imminent, the Romney administration staged a photogenic bill-signing ceremony in Faneuil Hall with Senator Kennedy, who flew in from Washington, at the governor’s behest. Recalls a longtime associate of Speaker DiMasi, “There was a sense we had that the event would wind up in a Romney-for-president campaign commercial.”

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Governor Romney ran Massachusetts as if it were a corporation, changing the business model and improving the numbers.Credit
Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

But the political spreadsheet that directed Mitt Romney to favor one landmark initiative could also dissuade him from favoring another. Among the more remarkable features of Romney’s early governorship was his determination to be not only a pro-environment executive but also a leader in the field. To oversee a broad portfolio of issues affecting the environment, Romney appointed Doug Foy, a lifelong environmentalist who had often sued the state in his capacity as C.E.O. of the Conservation Law Foundation. On May 6, 2004, Romney and Foy held a news conference to announce the release of a detailed climate-change action plan. In the plan’s cover letter, the governor argued forcefully that meeting the challenges of global warming made good business sense. Rather than demand definitive proof of the human contribution to climate change, the state should pursue a “no regrets” policy — one in which, Romney wrote, “we can also lead the nation in new energy technologies.” According to one of a half-dozen environmental officials with whom I spoke (and all of whom insisted on anonymity so they could speak candidly about their experiences), the governor sat through more than 20 hours of briefings on the climate-change plan: “We went through about 80 measures. He left almost everything in, and the things he took out weren’t because they were ideologically off-base but because they weren’t well thought out.”

A sentimental subtext underlay his conservationist outlook: his father’s company had produced one of the world’s first fuel-efficient cars. And when discussing the global dimensions of climate change, the governor displayed a level of humaneness that fellow congregants in his Mormon church often saw but that his current presidential campaign has been at pains to highlight. Two environmental officials recall him saying: “I think the impacts of this are going to be large. We in the Western world may have the money to work our way out of the problem. But what are poor people in Bangladesh going to do?”

At the same time, bucking conservative orthodoxy carried obvious risks, as Romney knew better than anyone. After all, George Romney’s proclamation in 1967 that he had been given a “brainwashing” by the military on the progress of the Vietnam War effectively ended his quest for the presidency. “Being right early is not good in politics,” Romney would quote his chastened father as saying — and in turn signaling that the son would not repeat the mistake.

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“Have you seen the movie ‘Animal House’?” one of Governor Romney’s environmental officials asked me. “You remember that character who has the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, both telling him what to do? Watching Romney, my sense was that he was always inclined to do the right thing on environmental issues. But then there was the devil on the other side. You could almost see it. It was palpable. Clearly, in retrospect, he was weighing what was right for Massachusetts with how it would play nationally.”

Fully a year before unveiling his climate-change plan, Romney agreed to participate in the creation of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (pronounced “reggie”), a consortium of nine Northeastern states invited by Gov. George E. Pataki of New York to formulate the nation’s first comprehensive cap-and-trade, greenhouse-gas-reduction policy. In a July 21, 2003, letter to Pataki, Romney wrote that “now is the time to take action toward climate protection.” He noted that his administration “has a target of reducing greenhouse gases” and added that “I believe that our joint work to create a flexible market-based regional cap-and-trade system could serve as an effective approach to meeting those goals.” The concept appealed to Romney’s penchant for cutting-edge solutions. One of Romney’s top officials told me that if the states had been able to finalize an agreement during the first year and a half of Romney’s term, “there’s no question he would have signed. No doubt about it.”

But Romney’s desire to be bold on climate change wasn’t shared by fellow Republicans. Already the Bush administration had backed out of the Kyoto Treaty. In late 2004 and early 2005, the governor began to give speeches to Republican audiences in the conservative early-primary states Iowa and South Carolina. Following these travels, Romney’s chief of staff, Beth Myers, who assisted in Romney’s bid for governor in 2002, made her presence felt in the RGGI negotiations. As the guardian of Romney’s political ambitions, she remained in frequent contact throughout 2004 and 2005 with operatives who formed a Romney political-action committee to raise money for a presidential campaign, according to someone involved in the communications. Later, Myers would become the manager of that campaign. Myers “hated climate-change from Day 1,” says one top environmental official who frequently discussed the issue with her. “It didn’t fit her political equation.” She contacted the other RGGI states and conveyed to them that the governor now had concerns. Romney was insisting on a hard cap. Though there was an economic logic to the idea, introducing a hard cap would have by definition placed a regulation on an otherwise free market. The demand “came out of nowhere,” recalls one of Pataki’s senior officials. “There’d been no talk about an allowance cap for the first two years since the conversation started. It looked like a bait and switch. We watched Beth install her own cronies in the negotiations. It wasn’t lost on us that Doug Foy was dealing with some major internal strife.”

Foy could see that his boss was struggling to reconcile his predisposition toward RGGI with other considerations. Foy succeeded in persuading the other RGGI states to agree to a nonrigid cap that would come into play if prices went too high. But while his Office of Commonwealth Development was extracting cost offsets in an effort to make RGGI more palatable for Romney, the governor’s Office of Economic Development began to work with the defense contractor Raytheon and other businesses to oppose it. Both sides met in Romney’s office in December 2005. Though the setting was a Bain-like unemotional inquisition, the ex-C.E.O. seemed only selectively interested in the data. “He kept saying, in effect, ‘Yeah, but you can’t guarantee the prices won’t go higher,’ ” recalls one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. And Renee Fry, who represented the businesses seeking to jettison RGGI, says, “As we were leaving, he said, ‘I’ve got to think about how this is going to affect jobs.’ ” Romney’s desire to lead the nation on climate change had vanished from the discussion.

On Dec. 14, 2005, Romney publicly announced two things: that Massachusetts was withdrawing from RGGI and that he would not be seeking a second term as governor. Romney’s successor, Deval Patrick, reversed Romney’s decision shortly after taking office in January 2007, and Massachusetts has been a RGGI member ever since. Romney’s economic concerns turned out to be unwarranted. “I think the Massachusetts business climate is very strong — it would be hard to find any damage that was done by RGGI,” says David Tuerck of the conservative Beacon Hill Institute, which opposed RGGI. In fact, according to a 50-page independent analysis done by four energy experts, RGGI has led to more rather than fewer jobs and an overall net economic benefit.

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Romney greets an Iowa resident before speaking at a Republican Party fund-raiser in Davenport on Oct. 29, 2005.Credit
Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

When I contacted him, Doug Foy chose to put a positive spin on Romney’s climate-change odyssey. “I told him that we were eventually going to land RGGI — he knew that for a long time — but he never said, ‘You should stop,’ ” he told me. “Even though he never signed it, he allowed it to go on.”

Like RGGI, embryonic-stem-cell research was the kind of breakthrough concept to which Romney was instinctively drawn. The governor learned in the fall of 2004 that the Massachusetts Legislature would be considering a bill the following spring that would permit the cloning of embryos in lab research seeking a cure for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. As one Romney senior strategist told me, “I think the governor was predisposed to be in favor of stem cells.” But all that changed, Romney would later claim, on the day in November 2004 that he met with two Harvard researchers and thereafter decided not only to oppose embryonic cloning but also to reverse his long-stated support for a woman’s right to have an abortion.

The meeting took place at the governor’s request. Romney along with Beth Myers and Peter Flaherty, a senior adviser who would later serve as the presidential candidate’s liaison to social conservatives, met with Dr. Douglas Melton, co-director of Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute, and another Harvard representative. An internationally recognized pioneer in the field who briefed President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the subject, Melton has said that having a diabetic child animated his desire to seek a cure through stem-cell research. For nearly a half-hour, Melton explained to Romney and his staff how an embryonic stem cell is derived from a recently fertilized inner cell mass. Melton’s institute obtained such material, he told them, from in-vitro-fertilization clinics, where some 400,000 surplus ova sit in freezers, typically to remain indefinitely or to be discarded.

Acquiring these frozen embryos was anything but a casual process, both Harvard guests went on to explain. Each donor would undergo two rounds of informed consent over a period of a month, while Harvard itself insisted upon two separate rounds of ethical review — a painstaking process that at times frustrated the scientific community. Only a few of the 400,000 surplus embryos ended up being donated to the institute, where they were treated with particular care, like nothing else in the Harvard laboratories.

Romney asked questions throughout the presentation. When Melton began to describe the process of somatic-cell nuclear transfer — in which a cell from a patient with, say, Parkinson’s disease, is transferred into a denucleated egg so as to clone a new “defective” embryonic-stem-cell line that can be studied — the governor interjected, “Well that, then, is human life.”

What happened after that is disputed. A year and a half later, in June 2006, Romney would tell the journalist Judy Woodruff that the Harvard team displayed a flip attitude at the meeting that completely altered his thinking. “I sat down with a researcher, and he said, ‘Look, you don’t have to think about this stem-cell research as a moral issue, because we kill the embryos after 14 days,’ ” Romney recounted, explaining to Woodruff why he decided to change his position on abortion. “And that struck me as he said that. And I thought, Is that the extent to which we’ve cheapened life . . . that we think about killing embryos without batting an eye? And I recognized that I could no longer stand in the posture of saying, Look, I’m personally opposed, but I’m not gonna change the law. I needed to make it very clear that in my view, we are wrong to accept abortion, other than in cases of rape and incest.”

Romney repeated this story almost verbatim in a National Review profile published in December 2006, adding, “After the meeting I looked over at Beth Myers, my chief of staff, and we both had exactly the same reaction — it just hit us hard just how much the sanctity of life had been cheapened by virtue of the Roe v. Wade mentality.” Peter Flaherty recalls that the governor “suddenly seemed affected by it at the time — in body language, and saying something like, ‘This is clearly a serious issue.’ ”

But the Harvard participants do not recollect Romney showing any concern. On the contrary, they remember Romney saying that he was proud to be governor of a state where such important work was going on. Their first inkling that Romney felt so strongly about what he remembers being said came more than a year later, when he began publicly explaining his new stance on abortion.

Furthermore, Melton vehemently denies that he used the language Romney quoted. “I did not use the word ‘kill,’ ” he told me recently. “I’ve never used the word ‘kill’ in relation to this in any conversation with anyone, from elementary-school students to scientists in my laboratory to political leaders with whom I have met to discuss our work. And I wouldn’t use the word, because it is not descriptive in any way of the science we do.”

The Boston Globe columnist Gareth Cook, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on stem-cell research, has spent time with both Melton and Romney discussing the subject. “Doug Melton is an incredibly careful person — he was not at all cavalier about this,” Cook says. “Melton has always talked about this the way a lot of biologists do — that it’s not possible to answer the question of what constitutes a human life that should be afforded protections. It’s a continuum, and to say that there’s a point where life is breathed into something isn’t knowable in a scientific way, since you could argue that a skin cell or a sperm cell has the potential to be a human life. He never would have said ‘kill.’ That’s not how he thought about it.”

The meeting ended cordially, with Romney telling the two visitors from Harvard that he would like to stay in touch, though in fact they never communicated again after that day. What happened instead was that Flaherty contacted William Hurlbut, a Stanford bioethicist whose largely untested theory involving altered nuclear transfer — which uses cells that can’t produce a living being rather than embryonic stem cells — had been the subject of a recent Globe article by Cook. Hurlbut, a strong believer in legally protecting the human status of embryos, agreed to fly to Boston and meet with the governor. Excited by Hurlbut’s PowerPoint presentation, Romney exclaimed, according to one aide, “Why isn’t everybody buying into this?” (“What Hurlbut was floating was just a concept,” Cook says. “Obviously I wouldn’t have written about it if it were completely impossible or biologically absurd. It’s just that nobody’s going to do it, because it’s just too hard.”) Then Flaherty arranged for a third meeting — this time with the Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, a Catholic bioethicist and, like Hurlbut, a passionate believer in the human integrity of the embryo.

After these discussions, Flaherty says, “Mitt wanted to make sure that people had a window into his analysis,” to explain where he stood. In early 2005, Romney’s staff offered an exclusive interview with the governor to a New York Times reporter. The resulting article in The Times, on Feb. 9, disclosed that Romney would oppose the Legislature’s embryonic-cloning bill on the grounds that “there is an ethical boundary that should not be crossed.” Twelve days later, in a speech to Republicans in Spartanburg, S.C., the Massachusetts governor declared, to great applause, “Science must respect the sanctity of human life.” Two weeks after that, Romney wrote an op-ed in The Globe in which he declared, “Once cloning occurs, a human life is set in motion.” Finally, in a May 23, 2005, USA Today article that highlighted the presidential hopeful’s peculiar status as a Massachusetts Republican, Romney acknowledged to a reporter that “I’m in a different place” from his previous commitment not to challenge Roe v. Wade. His evolution on abortion was complete.

But as with his decision to withdraw from RGGI rather than seek to undermine it, Romney’s ultimate position on embryonic-stem-cell research seemed to send mixed signals. His amendments to the stem-cell bill would have banned embryonic cloning on the grounds that an embryo constituted human life while at the same time continuing to permit the creation, freezing and eventual destruction of hundreds of thousands of human embryos in I.V.F. clinics, as well as Harvard’s acquisition of those embryos for noncloning research. (The Legislature discarded his amendments and passed the bill permitting embryonic cloning, later overriding Romney’s veto.) And rather than simply side against Harvard’s research on moral grounds, Romney seemed equally determined to show that he had found a better solution than the one offered by the Stem Cell Institute, maintaining in his Globe editorial that “the greatest successes in stem-cell research to date” came from Hurlbut’s “promising approach.”

“He displayed an interesting combination of principle and pragmatism,” Hurlbut recalls. “Though maybe it’s giving me too much credit for the change in his opinion about abortion.”

“Romneys are, by nature, an adventurous breed,” Mitt Romney proclaimed with no apparent irony in his 2004 book “Turnaround.” Today that assertion is hard to square with the author’s stiff persona and his risk-averse path to the presidency. But Romney’s appetite for boldness marks his governorship, as does his sudden loss of that appetite; and even when policy risk-taking gave way to presidential ambition, perhaps it could be said that Romney was ahead of his time: years before the emergence of the Tea Party, he could see where the Republican Party was headed, and with an audacious turn to the right the Massachusetts governor was there waiting for it.

Should a president-elect Mitt Romney arrive in Washington with the apolitical C.E.O. orientation that he brought to the Massachusetts Statehouse in 2003 — and with nothing in his record to suggest that he, any more than Obama, can change a political culture “from the inside” — he will almost certainly encounter the same headwinds from the conservative flank of his party that seemed to blow him off course during his term as governor. After four years of Obama, the G.O.P. natives on Capitol Hill are restless. Their dutiful but fidgety optimism was bluntly expressed in a conversation I had with Rep. Raúl Labrador of Idaho, a freshman, an outspoken Tea Party star and, like Romney, a Mormon. “Everything in Romney’s background tells me he knows how to go into an organization that’s not working and make it work,” Labrador told me.

But to Labrador, a Romney presidency could “make it work” only by pursuing a resolutely rightward course. He warned: “If Romney comes in here and feels like he has to capitulate and govern from the middle of the road, not only will it be disheartening: I predict that you will see the conservatives in the House rise up. We’ve been pretty quiet — everybody claims we’ve been rambunctious, but we’ve been pretty quiet. I think you’ll see something different.”

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.”